The following text was written by Michael D. Schroeder
and J. Gray Sweeney and is contained in the illustrated catalogue Gilbert
Munger: Quest for Distinction, ISBN 1-890434-57-4, published by Afton
Historical Society Press, P.O. Box 100, Afton, MN 55001.The catalogue
accompanied a July 26 through October 12, 2003 exhibition at the Tweed Museum of Art .
The text is rekeyed and reprinted, without illustrations, with permission
of the Afton Historical Society Press. If you have questions or comments
regarding the text, or if you wish to purchase a copy of the catalogue,
please contact the Afton Historical Society Press directly through either
this phone number or web address:

Part I: American Years; Chapter 2: Artist-Explorer
of the West, continued(catalogue pages 34 through 77)

PERFECT GLORY OF SUNSET

Munger could paint the specifics of a landscape to please
a geologist, but he also knew how to delight connoisseurs of art. In the
only exhibition-sized painting of Yosemite Valley currently
known (Plate 33), Munger painted what appears at first glance to be another
standard valley view at sunset. Unlike the sometimes exaggerated effects
of light in Bierstadt's pictures that were increasingly criticized by art
critics, Munger's sky seems restrained, yet it is illuminated by glowing
light expressing the requisite sentiments of transcendence so commonly associated
by nineteenth-century viewers with the end of the day. The foreground places
the viewer on the valley floor, obscured in shadows by the retreating sun.
The realistic disposition of trees suggests the accuracy of Munger's picture,
unlike the idealized foregrounds of certain Bierstadt paintings.

In 1874 a critic wrote of another of Munger's Yosemite
sunsets that "[we see] the golden rays of descending sun falling upon
the mighty cliffs, transforming their dull gray to perfect glory of splendid
hues. Through the golden mist the mighty peaks rise and fade far into the
distance. The sunbeams shimmer on the foliage and dance on the placid stream."[79] King's description of a Yosemite sunset
could serve as commentary on Munger's painting with its strong scientific
inflection: "Sunset, at this hour there is no more splendid contrast
of light and shade ... rocks rising opposite in full
light, while the valley is divided equally between sunshine and shade. Pine
groves and oaks, almost black in the shadow, are brightened up to clear
red-browns ... the last sunlight reflected from some curious smooth surfaces
upon rocks ... I once suspected them to be glacier marks, and booked them
for further observation."[80]

A LITTLE CONVENTIONAL: TREE, FOSSIL, RUINS OF ART

By the time Munger reached Yosemite it was already a major
California tourist attraction. In addition to the artful geology of the
valley, which had become the nation's first wilderness park during the Civil
War, there were the oldest living things known: the great sequoia trees.
Munger painted Giant Sequoias (Plate 34) and King extolled their
hoary age in Mountaineering. In another of the Yosemite paintings
on artist's board, which measure generally nineteen by twenty-seven inches,
Munger shows the trunks of the great trees with tiny figures gazing toward
them. The figures are positioned beneath a broken-off fragment of one of
the great trees, a veritable ruin of nature's art, gazing in awe at a still-standing
giant.

Munger was careful to precisely characterize the rugged
bark of the sequoia. They are shown, King wrote, growing "in company
with several other coniferous species, all grouped socially together, heightening
each other's beauty by contrasts of form and color." According to King,
the bark of the monarch of the forest is "thick, but not rough, is
scored up and down at considerable intervals with deep, smooth groves, and
is of brightest cinnamon color, mottled in purple and yellow." Almost
as if describing a painting, King characterized in poetic prose the visual
effects of the ancient grove of trees: "There is something memorable
in the harmonious yet positive colors of this sort of forest. First the
foliage and trunk contrasts finely, cinnamon and golden apple-green in the
Sequoia, dark purple and yellowish-green for the pine, deep wood-color and
bluish-green of fir."[81]

Colors from the palette of an artist not withstanding,
King's scientific explanation for the longevity of the great trees was due
to their "vast respiring power, the atmosphere, the bland, regular
climate, which gives such long life, and not any richness or abundance of
food received from the soil." The California forest seemed inconsequential
compared with the giant sequoia: "No imperishableness of mountain-peak
or of fragment of human work, broken pillar or sand-worn image half lifted
over pathetic desert, - none of these link the past and to-day with anything
like the power of these monuments of living antiquity, trees that began
to grow before the Christian era, and, full of hale vitality and green old
age, still bid fair to grow broad and high for centuries to come. Who shall
predict the limits of this unexampled life?" The sight of the giant
trees prompted King on a meditation of the age of life in a passage that
suggests a vision of nature shaped by Darwin, which, it is plausible to
suggest, Munger shared. "A mountain, a fossil from deepest geological
horizon, a ruin of human art," King wrote, "carry us back into
the perspective of centuries with a force that has become, perhaps, a little
conventional."[82]

Trees were to become a lifelong fascination for Munger,
a theme that deepened and ripened in his European period. At Yosemite he
painted an evocative grove of trees in Yosemite Valley Scene (Plate
35). In the midst of what a casual spectator might think was a manicured,
manmade landscape park, three wild bears are glimpsed roaming freely under
a canopy of wilderness trees. The bear, symbol of the state, was a near-mythical
animal for Californios and eastern tourists prized the sight of one. Munger's
painting is historicized, because bears were becoming less frequent by the
early 1870s when Munger got to Yosemite. More common would have been the
sight of tourists taking the view, a subject that inspired William Hahn's
humorous painting. The importance of the picture as a record of early California
was recognized in 1982, when it entered the collection at theOakland Museum.

Trees fascinated King, and in Mountaineering he
offered extended comments on the life of trees, their respiration, and beneficial
effects for humans, and he observed how artists might paint arboreal portraits
with their communal beauty: "Trees gather in thicker groups, lift themselves
higher, spread out more and finer-feathered branches ... they are wonderfully
like human communities. One may trace in an hour's walk nearly all the laws
which govern the physical life of man."[83] Later in his career Munger would expend substantial effort in
representing visually a belief in the life of trees, but in a style different
from, but influenced by, the expansive vistas of his western pictures.

San Francisco critics praised Munger as "one of the
most faithful and conscientious landscape artists who have ever made California
scenery a specialty; no other artist has so thoroughly entered into the
spirit of local character as he."[84] His success in the West was even noticed in the East. "It
must gratify Mr. Munger's old friends here to know that he is rapidly and
surely taking his place in the front rank of American artists," the
Washington Evening Star reported."

"Michael D. Schroeder is an internationally recognized computer
scientist with a distinguished technical publications and patent record.
He receives his doctorate from MIT, where he served on the faculty. As part
of pioneering teams at leading corporate research labs, including Xerox
PARC and now Microsoft Research, he specializes in net work and Web computing,
particularly E-mail and storage systems. Schroeder recently combined his
professional expertise with a personal interest in the art of western exploration
to build gilbertmunger.org, a Web site presenting the catalogue raisonné
of Munger's 200-plus known works and documentation of the painter's life
and art."

"J. Gray Sweeney is a historian who has widely published studies
and curated exhibitions about American art history. he received his doctorate
from Indiana University for his study of the artist-explorers of the American
West and the origins of the U.S. National Parks. He has written about American
regional art and the influence of Thomas Cole on the formation of the Hudson
River School. Among Sweeney's recent studies are The Columbus of the
Woods: Daniel Boone and the Typology of Manifest Destiny; Drawing
the Borderline: Artist-Explorers and the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey;
and "An 'Indomitable Explorative Enterprise': Inventing National Parks"
in Inventing Arcadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert. Sweeney
is a professor of art history at Arizona State University.